Copywriting Crisis #2 – Boosting Website Traffic Isn’t Easy

Where did you go, my website traffic, oh, oh, oh, oh, I want to know, where did you go, go, go, oh, oh, oh.

If you don’t know the song, that’s probably the worst blog opening you’ve ever read. If you do, I’ve just reacquainted you with a banger.

Now, if you read my last blog, aptly entitled – Copywriting Crisis #1: Upload My Copy Already – you’ll already know that I’m writing a series of blogs detailing the everyday challenges and calamities of a middle-aged copywriter. This is the next instalment in that gripping series.

In the beginning there was plenty

I have been an exceptionally fortunate freelance copywriter. I drew the curtain on agency life and joined the freelance throng back in 2013. They were very much halcyon days in this line of work. Content back then was the be-all and end-all, and there were relatively few freelancers, or agencies for that matter, who were pumping out anything particularly good. And AI was still confined to the sort of dystopia reserved for Black Mirror episodes.

Those favourable tailwinds meant that building a client base came relatively easily. We built a website (my co-founder at the time must take the credit for that) and put the on-page SEO foundations in place to make it visible.

Solid on-page SEO, regular blogging and a few guest blog posts on high-authority sites were enough to secure a top-three ranking for our primary homepage keyword and bring in traffic, enquiries and leads. Happy days.

The times they are a-changing

That was then, and this is now. And now I’m having to work an awful lot harder. I had an amazing client for four years who wanted 15 1,000-2,000-word articles each month. That took up the majority of my time and accounted for about 80% of my income. I didn’t need any other work, but I did have four or five other clients I’d do bits for here and there.

That main client – let’s make a topical reference here and call them Mr Big – decided to take all their copy in-house at the start of this summer. That left me with a content chasm to fill, and a website that was completely starved of attention. I’d done the basic website maintenance, security and updates, but I hadn’t written any blogs, added new pages or tracked my rankings for years.

A rude awakening

What I found when digging deeper into my site didn’t make for pretty reading. Where I’d once ranked consistently in the top three for my best-performing keyword, ‘SEO Copywriting Services’, I was now nowhere to be seen. And I wasn’t ranking for any other half-decent keywords either. It was an absolute rankings wasteland – try saying that quickly five times.

In terms of traffic, I was bringing in absolutely nothing, apart from lots of bots from Singapore and various other bot hotspots around the world, and I was pretty sure they weren’t in the market for piping-hot content. “This is a sticky predicament”, I thought. “What on earth should I do?”

Here’s what I did

I started by making a few tweaks. I thought adding ‘London’ and ‘UK’ to my metadata might help me game the system and bump up my rankings for localised searches, and it did a bit. But my traffic was still non-existent.

Next, I wrote a few blogs. This strategy worked so well in the early days that I thought blogging alone could potentially rocket me up the rankings. It didn’t. I also wrote a couple of new service pages in a bid to bring in more targeted traffic, also to no effect.

Now things were starting to get serious, so I made the admittedly belated decision to download Google’s Site Kit and Analytics 4. What I found was surprising.

I was getting very few impressions for the keywords I was actually targeting, but I was generating some for ‘Freelance Copywriter London’, ‘Copywriting Agency London’, and other related searches. Over three months, I bagged around 800 impressions for those search terms, but not a single click. I assumed that meant my site was showing on page 348 of the search results, an assumption that proved to be true.

However, my tiny mind began whirring (in hindsight, I can say with predictably disastrous consequences), and I wondered whether the fact that most of my impressions were for a keyword I wasn’t even targeting meant people weren’t searching for ‘SEO Copywriting Services’ anymore.

The more I thought about it, the more SEO copywriting seemed old hat. I surmised that these days, people probably assume that an online copywriter has SEO know-how as standard, and perhaps don’t include the term in their searches. There’s also GEO, AEO and all the rest of it that searchers expect, too.

Right, I thought, with a steely determination, I need to retarget the site.

And so it began

I began shifting my website’s focus from SEO copywriting to freelance copywriting. After much time-consuming work rewriting metadata and modernising much of the copy, I waited for visitors and enquiries to come flocking in.

They didn’t. Over the years, the freelance copywriting marketplace has become saturated, with far more websites competing for the top spots. I also had a website that had been largely inactive for a long time. I’m certainly no technical SEO specialist, but I ran an SEO audit to make sure there wasn’t anything else I was overlooking, and everything seemed tickety-boo.

So, what do I do now?

Other sources of copywriting enquiries

My website isn’t the only way I’ve found work over the years. PeoplePerHour was a reliable source of new projects in the early days (we’re talking 11 or 12 years ago). Upwork has also been productive more recently (four or five years ago), and at one point, for whatever reason, the LinkedIn algorithms seemed to think highly of me, bringing me three or four new long-term clients within a month.

With that in mind, I revisited those platforms to see whether they could work for me today. Briefly, this is what I found:

• PeoplePerHour – These days, PPH feels like a digital sweatshop. Granted, I wrote it off fairly quickly, but it seems best suited to ‘copywriters’ who are happy to write 300 blogs for £10. Sadly, that kind of productivity is a stretch for me.
  

• Upwork – The Upwork algorithm feels like an almighty mess. On the face of it, the platform still has some decent projects, so I’ve sent in 11 handwritten proposals (as in not AI – that sounds like I sent them a letter) over the last three months and included relevant examples of previous projects I’ve completed in the same sector for big-name clients, and not a single one of those proposals was read. Not one. Even the proposal I used ‘connects’ (my hard-earned cash) to boost to the top of the pile was ignored.
  
  I used to bag around 30% of the projects I applied for on Upwork, so the fact that my proposals weren’t even read all seems a bit fishy. I did have a quick look at Reddit, as one does, and the current iteration of the Upwork algorithm was being universally slated, even by people who have used it for many years. According to Reddit, “the platform is dead!”.
  

• LinkedIn – Over the years, I’ve picked up the odd bit of work on LinkedIn, and it always comes as a surprise because, beyond having a profile, it’s not a platform I actively use. It just seems to be a happy algorithmic accident. I know that loads of people actively post and network on LinkedIn, and good luck to them, but that just isn’t for me.

So, something may come from LinkedIn if the algorithmic gods decide to shine on me at some point in the next five years, but that doesn’t feel like a solid basis for a lead-building strategy. And at this point, I think Upwork and PPH are dead ends.

Back to the website traffic then

After all that, I find myself back where I started. Increasing my website traffic seems like the only way to go, but I’ve struggled to do it organically and I need a quick result. Then, the clouds part and the digital marketing gods speak to me in a nerdy, nasal voice. They say just three letters: P…. P…. C….

Despite having no experience creating a Google Ads campaign whatsoever, I misguidedly think, ‘How hard can it be?’. If I can pay for some traffic while beavering away organically, maybe I can finally generate some leads.

So, led by AI (bad idea), I dove into creating my very first paid advertising campaign. I must admit, I thought the Google Ads interface all felt a bit naff, but I battled on, ably supported by my sycophantic AI partner, and created something that looked a bit like a functioning Google Ads campaign.

My very own PPC campaign!

I’m now the proud owner of two ad campaigns, one targeting copywriting services and the other AI copy editing, which is basically making AI copy less shit. I also spent a bit of time making my ad landing pages a little more sales-focused by front-loading the most important information so as not to waste those precious – and very expensive – clicks.

And so far, after several hundred impressions and around 30 clicks, my ads have generated absolutely nothing, not a sausage, while costing me 80 or so quid. Yay.

In its infinite and unquestionable wisdom, Google has also now given my copywriting services campaign a low ad score, despite serving it up without any issues for several weeks. That means it’s only producing around 20 impressions and a couple of clicks a day, rather than the initial 80 or so impressions and five or six daily clicks.

I’d have thought a click-through rate approaching 10% meant the ad was actually doing a pretty good job. But apparently not. If I want more impressions, I supposedly have to increase my bid limit to make up for the poor ad score. Call me a cynic, but that sounds like a decent result for Google.

So, what now?

Utter and absolute misery.

Nah, not really. But after all those unsuccessful website traffic adventures, I am pretty much back to square one. I currently have a minuscule amount of traffic, almost all of which I’m paying for. And it’s producing absolutely nothing.

That’s why I’d be ever-so-grateful if anyone out there could point out something, anything, I’ve missed. Please give me a shout at hello@toyourheartscontent.co.uk if you’d like to point out my glaringly obvious mistakes.

Photo by Jake Blucker on Unsplash